Why sending information is not the same as creating understanding
A leadership team can be convinced it has communicated the strategy clearly while the people responsible for delivering it have a completely different picture.
Research led by Dr Donald Sull at MIT Sloan examined this exact problem across 124 organisations. One of them was a large US technology company with more than ten thousand employees. Its strategy had five pillars, set two years earlier and unchanged since, and the CEO talked about them constantly. The annual engagement survey had just come back, and 97% of senior leaders reported a clear understanding of the strategy.
The researchers then worked with the CEO and head of HR to identify the 132 people most critical to executing it, from senior leaders through to frontline supervisors, and asked them to name the five pillars.
A quarter could name three. A third could not name one.
Two of the eleven top team members, the people in the room when the strategy was built, named none.
The leaders responsible for communicating the strategy believed it was understood. The people responsible for executing it told a very different story.
We have seen the same problem closer to home.
At one of Australia’s big banks, CJM surveyed 250 senior leaders and found widespread confusion about the organisation’s strategy.
When the findings were presented to the CEO, his response was that it was impossible. Not that the sample was wrong or the numbers were off. Impossible, because he had personally travelled to every city in the country, run town halls and delivered the strategy himself.
And that is precisely the problem.
He was measuring communication by what had been sent, not by what had landed.
Communication is not the sending of information
This distinction sits at the heart of effective communication.
We tend to think communication has happened when we’ve explained something, presented it, written it down, or said it clearly enough. But communication is not simply the sending of information.
Communication is the narrowing of the gap in understanding between two or more people.
And that work belongs to everyone involved, not simply the person speaking.
As CJM facilitator and coach Eddy Harrison-Lee puts it, there is a familiar saying from the IT industry:
“We built what you asked for, not what you wanted.”
It captures the problem perfectly.
The information may have been exchanged. The instructions may even have been followed.
But shared meaning was never created.
The difficulty is that the gap between the two can be almost invisible while you’re inside it.
So how do we make that gap visible?
That is where the five conditions come in.
1. Contact: shared attention
Before communication can happen, attention has to be present.
That sounds basic. It isn’t.
Being in the room doesn’t mean someone is paying attention. Being on the call doesn’t mean someone is engaged. Looking at the person speaking doesn’t necessarily mean you’re with them.
And it works both ways.
Listeners can role-play attention. Speakers can role-play contact with an audience while concentrating more on delivering their message than noticing whether anyone is actually with them.
Without genuine contact, everything that follows becomes harder.
The diagnostic question is:
Is the attention genuinely here, from both of us, or are we relying on the fact that we turned up?
2. Context: shared relevance
Information needs somewhere to land.
Context is what gives information meaning by answering a fundamental question:
Why does this matter?
And context needs to come before the content, not after it.
A leader can present a perfectly clear strategic priority, for example, but if the people listening don’t understand why it matters to them, their team or the organisation, clarity alone won’t create shared understanding.
The diagnostic question is:
Do all parties share an understanding of why this matters to each other, or have we assumed it?
3. Connection: shared trust
We cannot completely separate a message from its messenger.
Who is saying something, the history between the people involved, and the level of trust already present all affect how a message is received.
When trust is low, everything costs more.
Questions can sound like challenges. Feedback can feel like criticism. Decisions can attract resistance that has little to do with the decision itself.
When trust is high, things can move much faster.
The diagnostic question is:
Are we dealing with the message, or with the messenger?
4. Content: shared meaning
This is the condition most people associate with communication.
What are we actually saying?
But good content isn’t about adding more information. Its job is to lower the cost of understanding.
Structure matters. Sequencing matters. Storytelling matters.
They help turn information into meaning rather than leaving the other person to work through a pile of data and determine the meaning for themselves.
The diagnostic question is:
Did the meaning actually arrive, or did we just exchange information?
5. Commitment: shared expectations
This is where an interaction can feel complete when it isn’t.
Everyone leaves the meeting satisfied.
Everyone thinks they know what was decided.
Then Monday arrives, and three people act on three different interpretations.
A commitment doesn’t exist because two people privately assume they have agreed.
It exists when expectations are explicit and shared.
The diagnostic question is:
Would both of us describe where this landed and what happens next the same way?
How do you know your communication actually landed?
You verify it.
And that requires more than asking:
“Do you understand?”
Eddy describes this as one of the most useless questions in the English language because it tests someone’s confidence rather than their comprehension.
The MIT Sloan example makes the problem clear.
Ninety-seven per cent of senior leaders reported that they understood the strategy.
When the people responsible for delivering it were asked to name it, a third could not name a single pillar.
So instead of asking whether someone understands, effective communicators find ways to surface what the other person has actually understood.
That is how an invisible gap becomes visible.
The five conditions aren’t a checklist
There is an important distinction in how the conditions work.
In a presentation, they can arrive in sequence. There has to be genuine Contact before anything else is possible. Context establishes the relevance that makes people want to narrow the gap in understanding. Connection establishes credibility and rapport so the audience will engage with the message instead of the messenger. All of which means the Content is genuinely engaged with, after which we can create Commitment about where we now stand and where we are going.
But human relationships are rarely that neat.
In a conversation, team, or ongoing client relationship, all five conditions are live at the same time.
They can strengthen.
They can decay.
And they need to be nurtured.
In an organisation with a strong sense of purpose and genuine trust, for example, some of the work around Context and Connection may already be “prepaid”.
In another environment, those conditions may need attention before the content has any chance of landing.
The conditions stay the same. The communication doesn’t.
The five conditions are universal.
How you meet them is contextual.
Creating Contact in a board presentation looks different from creating it in a one-to-one performance conversation.
Establishing Context with a long-term client is different from establishing it on a first discovery call.
Building Connection with a team you’ve led for five years isn’t the same as building it with a room you’ve just walked into.
That’s why effective communication can’t be reduced to a script or a handful of techniques.
The better question is:
Which condition needs my attention here?
That question gives leaders a practical way to look at communication before an important interaction, diagnose what happened after one, and adjust when something isn’t landing.
Because the measure of communication isn’t how much information we send.
It’s whether the gap in understanding gets smaller.
And when the stakes are high, that’s the gap that matters.
Communication isn’t complete when the message is sent. It’s complete when understanding is shared.
Want to strengthen the way your leaders communicate, connect, and create clarity? Discover how CJM can help.
